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There’s no guarantee Massimo Maccarone will be an A-League success, but that doesn’t mean the Italian should be written off before a ball has even been kicked.
Sometimes it feels like the prerequisites to being a football fan in Australia are never watching the game, not owning a TV and failing to understand how the internet works.
I see mindless comments posted across the web every day, but even I was blown away by the amount of negativity Maccarone’s signing generated.
Much of it came from posters who said they’d “never heard of” Maccarone – a strange thing to admit about a player who spent four seasons in the English Premier League with Middlesbrough.
More recently Maccarone has plied his trade with Tuscan club Empoli, who by my calculations featured live on beIN Sports in the early Sunday kick-off at home to Juventus and Napoli and away at Pescara last season.
But even if watching Empoli games live on Australian TV holds little appeal, Serie A posts highlights to YouTube after every round.
Yet the easy access to highlights didn’t stop plenty of online commentators from revelling in their ignorance and proclaiming that the signing of a player who scored against Juventus, Milan and Inter in 2015-16 was a waste of time and money.
And since it’s obvious very few of those commentating on Maccarone’s transfer have actually seen him play recently, I asked a couple of people who had.
David Biuzzi is a journalist at Tuscan newspaper Il Tirreno who covers Empoli for a living.
He told me Maccarone is a “great professional” who looks after his body, and that Empoli fans were “shocked” by his departure.
“I think he’ll do well in Brisbane,” Biuzzi told me. “He had offers to stay in Italy, both in Serie B and Serie C, but he preferred to create this new experience just because he’s very motivated.”
Biuzzi added that as the captain and inspirational leader of Empoli, Maccarone was even nicknamed ‘The Gladiator’ after Russell Crowe’s character in the 2000 Hollywood blockbuster.
I was put in touch with Biuzzi by Il Tirreno contributor Simone Pierotti, and both journalists agreed that Empoli’s relegation battle – they were leapfrogged by Crotone on a nail-biting final day – impacted Maccarone’s form.
“I can tell you that he was affected by the bad campaign by Empoli last year,” Pierotti said. “(However) he did quite well in the previous one as he netted 13 goals in 38 matches – not a bad score, considering that Empoli have always aimed to avoid relegation and that he’s not young anymore.”
It’s Maccarone’s age – he’ll be 38 by the time the new A-League campaign kicks off in October – that seems to have got the majority of Brisbane Roar fans in a tizzy.
Yet even the question of why Maccarone was signed in the first place is answered by simply acknowledging that Jamie Maclaren and Brandon Borrello are now at Darmstadt and Kaiserslautern respectively.
As for failing to retain Thomas Broich – arguably the A-League’s finest ever import, but one who hobbled through the back end of last season – the decision seemed to be the player’s as much as the club’s.
But that is beside the point. Maccarone may be no spring chicken, but it’s not every day a player who has scored 79 goals in Serie A pitches up in the A-League.
And if he fits in with John Aloisi – a coach who knows a thing or two about Italian football – and he passes on some know-how to the up-and-coming Nick D’Agostino, the Italian should be worth every cent of his reported $450,000 salary.
We complain all the time that the A-League is so far removed from Europe, but when a player with genuine European pedigree signs, we complain about that too.
Maccarone may be too old for the A-League – or he may be a huge success.
But I dare say we won’t know until we’ve actually seen the Italian play.